[conlang_learners] Comments on Alurhsa

[Jim Henry]

Alurhsa by Tony Harris is an artlang with a fictional setting;
conhistorically, it's an auxlang based on a reconstructed
protolanguage, but because of the culture of its
speakers, more complex and irregular than most or all Terran auxlangs.
Tony is fluent in Alurhsa -- I've heard him speak in it off-the-cuff.
He's been using it for over thirty years.

The phonology is complex, with 25 vowels (including nasal/oral
distinction and three degrees of length) and 46 consonants (including
distinctive bilabial vs. labiodental fricatives, dental vs. alveolar
stops, and postalveolar vs. retroflex fricatives).  The romanized
writing system requires acute, grave, circumflex and diaresis on
vowels, and a few other extended characters for consonants -- nothing
that isn't found in the Latin-1 character set or easily typed on a
U.S. International keyboard.  Many of the consonants are represented
by digraphs or even trigraphs.  The phonology description is generally
good, but would benefit by adding IPA symbols to the descriptions using
similar phonemes in various natlangs and instructions for how to
pronounce the more uncommon sounds.  Punctuation is well-defined and
not terribly complex or unusual.

Nouns inflect for six cases and two numbers, although plural
inflection is only used when no other indication of number appears.
There is an archaic, non-productive dual.  There are five noun classes
or genders, but only pronouns show agreement with their anaphors in
gender; adjectives, verbs etc. don't show gender agreement.

Pronouns inflect for person, number, gender, case, and formality; they
have gender agreement in first and second person as well as third
person, and three degrees of formality in the second person.

Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, voice, and mood, and agree with
their subject in person, number and formality.  They have a variety of
infinitives and participles for different tenses, voices and aspects.
The terminology used on the verbs page is a little nonstandard (e.g.,
referring to an "imperative tense" rather than "imperative mood"); I'm
not sure yet whether or to what extent this reflects a real difference
between Alurhsa and the familiar languages for which the standard
terminology was devised.

Positionals are the equivalents of prepositions and locative/temporal
adverbs in other languages; they interact with the case of their
object noun in interesting ways.

The Alurhsa articles show definiteness, but don't agree with their
heads in case, number, gender etc.

Numbers and other quantifier particles are invariant.

There are a number of productive but not always predictable derivation
processes, prefixes and suffixes and compounds.

A few pages on the Alurhsa website give 404 errors or are marked
as "under construction", but Tony says he can email us some newer
and fuller documentation than what is on the website.

There are a number of  texts on the website, both original and translated,
concultural and Terran, plus short sample phrases and sentences in
the grammar documents.  I especiallly like the page of folk sayings and
proverbs, e.g.,

Nelhé qórsës pólef ghílâ sevánán.
It takes a long time to find eternity.

Tony has also written a bilingual (Alurhsa and English) blog;

http://blog.alurhsa.org/

And there are seven MP3 files of Tony reading seven of the
texts; beautiful!

Alurhsa is a complex language, perhaps one of the more difficult
ones nominated, but there are certainly plenty of materials to practice
with.  I haven't counted up the total size of files on each site, but
I think it's roughly comparable to Vabungula and maybe exceeds most or
all of the other artlangs nominated in the size of its publicly
available corpus.

Amanda Furrow recently translated into Alurhsa for
the second Inverse Relay.  Amanda, would you like to comment on
Alurhsa as well, and particularly on the documents Tony sent you that
aren't on his website?

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/